LINGUIST fund-drive

[Megan Crowhurst]

LINGUIST, which hosts our list and which does a lot of the day to day
upkeep, and generally provides a valuable service to those of us who
use it regularly and for multiple reasons, is having a fund drive.
The moderators have asked us to consider posting a notice to our
lists, for those of us that are in a position to participate and want
to.  We thought we'd post this to GALA; my apologies if you received
this message yesterday on Fling.

A bit of local "cultch" (culture) for members not in the USA:  Here
in the US we have National Public Radio (NPR), which is the nearest
thing in quality to, say the CBC in Canada or the BBC in the UK,
though NPR is not nearly as well supported by federal funds.  NPR
programs are carried by local radio stations, generally operated on
university campuses across the country, and these local stations buy
NPR programming and supplement it with high-quality local
programming. The local programs in turn sometimes get picked up by
other stations, if they're of general interest.  But because the
stations are not especially well supported with federal funds, twice
a year all the local stations have a fund-drive, which means that for
10 minutes or so every half hour, your programming is cut off and
you're (a) asked to pledge a financial contribution with the promise
of receiving various sorts of "premiums" (small "thank you" gifts,
tee shirts, CDs, videos, and the like), and (b) scolded for using the
resource without pledging.  Major guilt trip.  In case you were
wondering why LINGUIST is promising to send tee shirts and
sweatshirts for contributions of different amounts, they seem to be
following NPR's model of promising premiums, that get better the more
you give them. However, Linguist is being pretty low-key with the
persuasive tactics; we are promised that we won't be spammed with
multiple requests for donations from the mother station. This is the
only one that will come your way, unless you're on other lists.

All the best,

Megan

----------------
Dear List-Owners:

As much as we hate the pressure applied to us to support various
charities, we'd like to bring your attention to the fund-drive that
LINGUIST has just begun.

Over the last few years, LINGUIST has grown into a large organization.
We are now the main source of linguistic job-advertisements, and post,
in addition, book announcements, reviews, calls for papers, conference
announcements, and discussions.  We run a web site that contains a
great deal of linguistic information: a list of dissertation
abstracts, software for linguists, and links to major publishers. And
we also offer a searchable archive of large numbers of linguistics and
language related lists, of which your list is one. If you haven't
checked out our site for a while (http://www.linguistlist.org), you
might find it informative.

For those who are people are overwhelmed by the volume of mail the
lists generates, we now offer linglite, which brings subscribers one
message a day, with a list of the LINGUIST messages posted that day,
each with a clickable URL that will take you to the relevant web
page. We hope, in the near future, to extend this functionality to all
the lists we host.

We also, as you are aware, provide a list-hosting service for lists
which are relevant to language and linguistics.

Sadly, the list cannot run itself for free. Despite the fact that the
moderators are volunteers, and we receive some payments from
publishers and from Eastern Michigan U and Wayne State U, we still
require over $35,000 each year to maintain our level of
services. These funds come from subscriber donations. They go to pay
our student editors.  The machine on which our listserv runs costs
$35,000 alone, and the listserv software which runs on it has cost
close to $10,000 over the past few years.

We have no desire to spam the lists on our site, asking for
contributions.  So we are sending this message to you, the listowners
of the LINGUIST listserv site, asking that you consider forwarding
this message to your subscribers. Please feel no pressure to do so.
But we hope that some of your subscribers will be generous enough to
contribute to LINGUIST's upkeep, and consider making a small donation
to the list. For their convenience, we offer secure Credit Card
donations at:

           http://www.linguistlist.org/funddrive.html

Or they can send a check made out to the "LINGUIST Editorial Support"
fund to the following address:

      The EMU LINGUIST Editorial Support Fund
      c/o Dept of English Language & Literature
      Eastern Michigan U.
      Ypsilanti, MI 48197
      USA

All contributions are tax-deductible in the United States of America.

In gratitude we offer the following "rewards" to individual donations:

           Shortsleeved "LINGUIST" teeshirt with $30.00
           Long sleeved LINGUIST teeshirt with $50.00
           LINGUIST Sweatshirt with $70.00

Many thanks, and our apologies for this message!

Anthony Aristar, Helen Dry, & Andrew Carnie
Moderators, LINGUIST
~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'~~'
Megan Crowhurst, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics

Mailing address:	Calhoun 501
			The University of Texas at Austin
			Austin, TX  78712-1196
			USA

Phone: 512-471-1701, Fax:   512-471-4340
University mail code:  B5100